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Wonderland - platform for european architecture

Since 2002 we share content, promote emerging architects and initiate relevant projects. The results are published or shared through lectures with the interested audience.
Now it's time to enable our members to publish their own content on the wonderweb - wonderland's digital platform. This new platform will help us all to publish, share, follow, update, comment and connect information about all our activities.
Formats developed by wonderland with annual projects are presented on this platform through their own channel (see the left menu):
Blind Date - an interdisciplinary rendezvous with a stranger.
Project Space - an urban work shop with an international call.
Movies in wonderland - a pop up festival in the public space with architecture relevant movies.

Architektur.Film.Sommer

Resisting Architecture

On six different evenings in August the fourth Architektur.Film.Sommer offers a high quality programme of short films, essay films and documentaries in the framework of frame[o]ut, shown in the courtyard of the Architekturzentrum Wien in the MusemsQuartier Wien.

This year’s theme “Resisting Architecture” can be looked at from two different perspectives: on the one hand the focus is on resistance to planned building projects, the rejection of built structures and boundaries, while on the other a look is taken at the idea of resistance that is innate to self-determined building. The festival shows that own-initiative and self-organization harbour the potential to produce new forms of architecture and also to renew the social system within such architecture.

In the open-air setting visitors and passers-by are invited to linger, enjoy the programme and to join in discussions with the film-makers present.

PROGRAMME:

At the opening of the film festival frame[o]ut in Hof 8 of the Museumsquartier Wien festival head, Martina Theininger, and the curators of the Architektur.Film.Sommer, Karoline Mayer/Az W and Marlene Rutzendorfer/wonderland, present this year’s programme.

On the opening evening of the Architektur.Film.Sommer mountains are, literally, moved. Director Ella Raidel presents a floating mountain and follows an artistic expedition across the Traunsee in Upper Austria. “DLRG“ skilfully animates the plans of the headquarters of the Deutsche Lebens-Rettungs-Gesellschaft, whose architecture resembles a ramp for the boats of the water rescue service, located on the banks of the Havel. In “Andermatt – Global Village“ Leonidas Bieri portrays a sleepy village in the Swiss Alps poised between hope and scepticism, as an Egyptian billionaire promises to lead it out of the crisis by creating a luxury resort there.

The films shown on this evening are devoted to the meaning of borders, which may have already been abolished, as in “Granica”, or which are fluid, as in the film “Europe Endless”, which tells about being stranded in Malta and the hope of getting further. This sense of waiting on the threshold is also expressed in the short film “Behördengang”, and even more strongly in “Flotel Europa”, which tells about the life in a Danish container ship of the director, who fled from former Yugoslavia.

POSLEDNIY LIMUZIN (THE LAST LIMOUSINE), RU/DE 2014, 74 mins, original with English subtitles, Dir: Daria Khlestkina

The people portrayed are those who no longer fit into the picture of contemporary society: the penniless in a wealthy city like London, which aims to banish visible poverty from the city, or workers who are being replaced by automated means of production. The films show stories, faces and environments from a lost time, as well as the nostalgia of people to whom it is completely clear that nobody needs them.

Self-empowerment through self-build is the theme of this festival evening. The films cover an area that extends from the “Microbrigadas”, a kind of settler movement in Cuba in the 1970s, to Christoph Schlingensief’s opera village in Burkina Faso, and from Diébédo Francis Kéré to Kadri Batusha, the individual who takes over the role that the state fails to play in Kosovo, redefines housing construction and in the process builds a castle.

Prefabrication as the herald of a new era. In both capitalist and communist societies an attempt was made to use prefab concrete elements to realize housing dreams, cleanly, efficiently and rapidly. “Concrete Stories“ tells about the joys and sorrows of life in the system-built housing blocks and recounts very personal histories and experiences from the world of standardised housing. Vorort traces the development of a new-build housing estate in a green setting, while “Excuse me, while I disappear“ reflects upon the – still largely unfulfilled – promises of Chinese investors in a dormitory town planned for 210 000 people in Luanda, Angola.

The final evening of the Architektur.Film.Sommer 2016 is devoted to the notion of “home”. The films shown are about people who are rooted in a particular place and refuse to move out when they are no longer wanted or permitted to be there. While the illegal residents of Tschernobyl are not deterred even by life-threatening levels of radioactivity, the artists of the Kathputli Colony in New Delhi refuse to accept their supposed fate and actively resist an investor’s project.

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A moving film festival packed with engaging movies carrying architectural themes.
Movies in Wonderland is a travelling open air pop up film festival on architecture and urbanism, taking place in public spaces.The festival takes place in many cities throughout
Europe as it engages audiences to discuss their cities and neighborhoods with filmmakers, planners and other
special guests. Since 2012 the movies in wonderland network has been extending its reach with screenings in Vienna (AT), Budapest (HU), Linz (AT), Brno (CZ), Cluj (RO), Mannheim (DE), Kiev (UA) and Berlin (DE).
The movies in wonderland team consist currently of Marlene Rutzendorfer, Daniela Schulhofer and Marta Medvesek.